Most of the knowledge that an organization requires to move forward already resides within its people. It just needs to be discovered and harnessed so that it can be applied to the challenges and opportunities at hand.
Leadership
Great leaders understand that they ultimately exist to serve others. In doing so, they demonstrate commitment to people and receive true authority as a sacred trust from their followers.
Purpose
Increasingly, people want to purchase products and services with businesses that share their values. A great organization understands that its purpose must go beyond profit and be linked to a transcendent purpose with which employees and consumers align.
Trust
Trust is the bedrock of an organization and enables innovation and healthy risk-taking. It is cultivated when leaders empower employees to fulfill their own potential as they serve the mission of the organization.
Change
Meaningful organizational change begins within the heart of leaders and ultimately takes root when the desired transformation is lived out and modeled for others. Over time this creates a culture that is resilient and adaptable.
Leadership Circles
(by Marv Franz). The workplace is designed for production. People are designed for purpose. Our world needs leaders that are committed to the growth of people and communities. Leaders are best formed in communities that care about one another, re-kindle hope, reflect and learn together, encourage mutual growth.
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Evaluations Matter
(by Chris Houston and Marv Franz). Given our increasing knowledge about good governance, is our governance good enough and is it improving? If your board is wondering about its effectiveness, it needs to begin with a well-designed and well-executed assessment process – one that reveals the truth about your board, its overall effectiveness and the individual contributions of each director.
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To lead with purpose is to align the ambition, strategy and action of your organization.
It requires a courageous heart, an insightful mind and a deft touch. To do this well is very art of leadership.
We want to serve you by being your trusted advisor on this journey. We will be responsive to what you really need and help you succeed through change and uncertainty.
Let us help you re-imagine purpose, articulate strategy, and strengthen and align the leadership of your team and board.
New Book Release from New Vantage
Marv Franz
About
Marv Franz is the principal of New Vantage. He consults to senior leaders, executive teams, and boards through change processes. He consistently helps management and project teams to heighten overall performance by sharpening their focus and then coaching individual team members through their own unique leadership and management challenges.
Expertise
Marv applies his skills and experience to the needs of his clients in strategy design and execution, organizational design, performance measurement design and assessment, executive team development and leadership coaching. In addition, he has experience helping boards develop governance systems that improve their impact and effectiveness. He has published on board governance effectiveness, and has been a business lecturer.
Marv has worked with small firms to multinationals in consumer goods, advertising, health care, technology, sports and entertainment, education, insurance and transportation, government sectors as well as other not-for-profit organizations. He has experience in working through intercultural challenges having worked with senior leaders in in North America, Latin America and Africa.
Experience
To serve his clients, Marv draws upon a unique combination of educational and past work experience. He holds an MBA from the School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University specializing in Strategy, holds university undergraduate degrees in Biology (B.Sc. hons) and Education (B.Ed), as well as two graduate theology degrees.
Prior to this, Marv has spent six years as a management consultant and partner with the Change Alliance and twelve years as a team and leadership developer in both Canadian university and international NGO contexts. Over this period he has worked as a manager within university student services departments at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, and Wilfrid Laurier in Waterloo, Ontario.
Here he developed and managed staff teams, offered leadership on university management teams, as well as created leadership curriculum, training programs and international service-learning teams in partnership with NGO’s in developing world contexts in Latin America and Africa.
Contact Marv Franz
Marv Franz
Phone: 519-618-9333
Mobile: 519-590-0470
Email:
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We partner with you to design and facilitate a planning process that combines fresh thinking, robust participation and analytic rigor in the creation of strategy.
Senior leaders often come looking for help with the development of their corporate strategy or a range of business challenges. We assist you with a carefully crafted process to fit the context and culture of your organization – one that results in a creative plan that drives action and re-energizes your team’s commitment to the future of your organization.
We partner with you to help manage the change that is inherent in the evolution or revolution of your business.
Complex strategies may leave you wondering, “How are we going to work together to get this done?” They require new collaboration, interpersonal savvy and insight. We help you re-align responsibilities and accountabilities of your leaders and teams so that you can launch high-performance project teams, coach leaders, and integrate a portfolio of change planning activities.
We partner with you to create innovative learning initiatives that grow talent and enable leaders to thrive in the workplace.
We are convinced that many training programs fall short precisely because they are not designed to be transformative experiences that create lasting growth and change. In order to grow, leaders need a safe environment to be transparent about their successes and struggles. To help the organization achieve its purpose, leaders need to reflect on and discuss challenges together. We help you attract, develop and retain the next generation of leaders though custom high-potential leadership growth initiatives.
We partner with you as you identify tangible ways to improve governance function, overall board health and individual director contribution.
Senior leaders invite us to help their governance boards bring about renewal and greater effectiveness. We do this by helping boards understand and adopt good governance practices, and facilitate evaluation processes of boards and directors. We also coach you board to implement structure and process change that enhances board effectiveness.
A CEO in the advertising industry runs a sprawling network of businesses in a global region that must work together in order for everyone to be successful. In the midst of economic challenges, stiff competition, and limited trust the CEO looks to help this network most effectively use it strengths and economies of scale in order to successful serve their clients.
The Problem
How will business and creative leaders agree and build important capabilities that can be shared across the corporation and add value to their clients?
The Solution
The solution would lie in business and functional leaders first facing the reality that working independently would clearly lead to business failure. The team of leaders was interviewed and surveyed to draw out sensitive issues that had to be addressed across businesses and functions. Then the group of leaders and functional leaders were brought together in a summit over several days that allowed them to identify and own shared goals, wrestle through business challenges, build trust personally with one another and make actionable commitments to shared objectives. What were the keys to success? A CEO who was willing to invest the resources, time and energy to address the heart of the matter and a facilitated dialogue that enabled leaders to be real, transparent and willing to contribute the success of the whole.
The Success
The global region made commitments to each other (and followed through) achieving outstanding financial results over the following years that would provide an example in business cooperation for other global regions.
The Context
A senior leader in a public sector organization oversees well over 1500 staff looking to create a culture that would empower staff and strengthen the leadership. The workplace is staffed with unionized and lifetime workforce where culture change tends to be slow in coming. Managers and staff alike feel the pressures of funding decreases, increasing regulatory requirements and public scrutiny.
The Problem
How can a new culture of empowering leadership be developed – one that leads to greater leadership capability, support, effectiveness and a real sense of community in the workplace?
The Solution
The answer would not be more management training or any top-down approach, for that matter. The answer would come from the bottom-up, with the support of senior leadership. A small hand-picked team of staff across the organization were assembled with the client to create an customized initiative that would really address what leaders need to grow and be effective. This group clarified the culture shift that was needed and then developed a leadership development concept that could be scalable and sustainable over time. What was created? An innovative learning environment characterized by the following:
Voluntary – nothing mandated;
Groups of approximately 10 or so leaders gathered once every few weeks and led by skilled facilitators;
Participants felt ‘safe’ to discuss workplace real challenges;
World-class leadership content was assembled to reflect stimulate their thinking and allow them to reflect on leadership experiences in the workplace;
Participants were free to give and receive feedback.
This became a learning environment that enabled transformational learning precisely because it engaged leaders where they were at and took seriously how they wanted to grow their own leadership.
The Success
Over three years, this initiative produced many groups that have impacted about 75 leaders and created a transformation that had improved the leadership capability of the organization and spawned new innovations in service delivery throughout the organization. It was recently acknowledged by Excellence Canada as a key driver of creating world-class leadership
The Context
The CEO of a training company led a transformation that integrated multiple stand-alone businesses into one business with complementary service lines. These changes led to successful growth of the company but raised questions about the effectiveness of the board’s structure that still mirrored the past corporate form, and revealed gaps and inefficiencies in board governance oversight.
The Problem
How must board systems now align with the business and management in order to be the board of the future and provide governance leadership for the organization?
The Solution
When it became clear that simple adjustments were not adequate to address the problem, a full board review was undertaken to assess all areas of board governance. Through interviews, surveys, analysis, and in comparison to board best practice, a comprehensive picture of board effectiveness emerged. This led to a clear set of recommendations with a roadmap for implementation that could be safely discussed in the context of a well-facilitated discussion. It was vital to ensure that Board members and Management felt that they were listened to, respected and engaged throughout the process.
The Success
The recommendations including difficult, major changes to board structures and processes and over time, board composition were adopted. Over the following year, the recommendations were implemented successfully and led to significant growth in board governance capabilities.
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Every organization has a circle and a triangle:
The triangle represents the mind and function of the organization – the means. Its sharp corners represent the management hierarchy that enables the organization to efficiently produce, sell or deliver a service. It needs to build in proper controls, focus its attention on performance, efficiency, establishing systems, processes and policies in order to accomplish tasks and objectives. The triangle asks “What must we do?” and “How must we do it” – ensuring that everything can be measured and objectively understood. Fundamentally, the triangle is the scaffolding of the organization and what makes its engines run.
The circle represents the heart and purpose of the organization – the ends. Its rounded shape symbolizes that the organization is a community of people that have something important to contribute together. The circle emphasizes the interdependence of its employees and important of team. It is aspirational in nature leadership of people rather than the management of systems. The circle asks, “Why are we doing this?” and concerns itself with purpose, vision, courage, empathy, significance, the importance of history and values. Fundamentally, the circle is the soul of the organization that enables the organization to understand its own meaning and it true contribution to its stakeholders, customers and employees.
In many organizations, there is great confusion and conflict between the means and the ends. Both are necessary and should work in balance. However, in many organizations, the triangle contains the circle resulting in organizational dysfunction.
The focus of leadership development is to expand the circle capabilities in leaders so that the organization can successfully live out the purposes of the organization within the realities of the triangle.
New Vantage has developed an innovative leadership offering called Leadership Circles that equip leaders by:
Creating a safe environment to reflect upon as well as openly discuss successes and challenges at work.
Providing opportunities to reflection upon world-class leadership content.
Enabling peer-to-peer feedback, encouragement and knowledge sharing.
Being an effective governance board requires sustained effort in practicing good governance. Four common challenges that boards face on this journey include:
The knowledge challenge: The board simply doesn’t live and breathe the work like management does. The knowledge chasm between management and the board can only be bridged when the board and management ensure that the ‘altitude’ of the boardroom discussion is at the level of purpose, mission and strategy rather than on gaining greater knowledge of operational matters. Otherwise there is no meeting across the chasm. To what degree is your board focused at the right level of engagement and discussion?
The attention challenge: The reality is that there is always loss of attention and memory of board matters in the period between board meetings. And yet, this is precisely the time much of the governance work becomes operational. This loss of attention in the jungle of competing demands can result at times in delays and unclear hand-offs. How successful is your board in consistently getting its work done and with excellence.
The diversity challenge: Each director brings a unique set of experiences and skills to bear on the work of governing that must fit the skills and experience profile that board requires. And like any team, there are unique roles and skill sets that fit together like a puzzle. Is the talent around your board table being maximized to its greatest potential?
The relevance challenge: A vital role that the board plays is to continue scanning the changing environment of the business and ask: Are we continuing to remain relevant given our purpose and who we serve? Typically boards are reactive and respond to the initiative of management. However, the board must ensure that its focus, skill sets and perspectives are well suited for the future of the organization. How might our board need to grow or change in order to lead into the future?
New Vantage has developed a model for governance effectiveness that allows your board to address each of the challenges and identify ways to improve governance effectiveness.
